A random collection of over 1910 books and audiobooks authored by or about my transgender, intersex sisters, and gender-nonconforming persons all over the world. I read some of them, and I was inspired by some of them. I met some of the authors and heroines, some of them are my best friends, and I had the pleasure and honor of interviewing some of them. If you know of any transgender biography that I have not covered yet, please let me know.
Original title: "Lo que queda de mí: Lo más difícil no es cambiar, es atreverse a ser" (What's left of me: The hardest thing is not to change, it's to dare to be) by Karla Sofía Gascón Ruiz.
In Lo que queda de mí: Lo más difícil no es cambiar, es atreverse a ser (What’s Left of Me: The Hardest Thing Is Not to Change, It's to Dare to Be), Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón doesn’t just continue her story, she tears the veil off it. This searing, unsparing memoir is both a follow-up and a counterpoint to her 2018 autobiographical novel Karsia. Una historia extraordinaria (Karsia. An Extraordinary Story), written under her former name, Carlos Gascón.
But where Karsia traced the outlines of her transition, Lo que queda de mí dives into the abyss, unflinching, raw, and deeply human.
From the first lines, “A body suspended in the void. A final breath. A moment where time fragments and the mind retraces the paths that led it there”, Gascón’s prose sets the tone: visceral, immediate, and unapologetically personal. This is not a celebrity tell-all, nor a curated victory lap. This is a descent into the wounded core of being. It is, in her own words, “not just a story; it’s a strangled cry, a confession without filters.”
Karla Sofía Gascón has lived many lives, actor, public figure, immigrant, trans woman, controversy magnet, Cannes winner. And yet, she begins Lo que queda de mí not with triumph, but with fragility. That suspended body isn’t just metaphor. It’s the image of a person fractured by years of self-denial, survival, and social performance. “How much of our existence is just an act?” she asks. “And what happens when the curtain finally falls?”
2025,
Carlos Gascón,
Karla Sofia Gascon,
Karla Sofía Gascón Ruiz,
Spanish,
Original title: "Karsia. Una historia extraordinaria" (Karsia. An extraordinary story) by Carlos Gascón.
When the acclaimed actor is found hanging in his apartment, the opening scene of Karsia. Una historia extraordinaria plunges readers into a narrative that is far more than a whodunit or a simple flashback. It is a harrowing descent into the soul, a cathartic and deeply philosophical journey that blurs the lines between life and death, truth and imagination, memory and re-interpretation.
Written by Carlos Gascón, who would later come out as Karla Sofía Gascón, the first transgender actress to win Best Actress at Cannes, the book is both a literary confessional and a fictionalized inner monologue delivered at the edge of the abyss.
At its core, Karsia dares to ask a haunting question: Can death gift us life? The narrative orbits around this premise with stunning emotional clarity, as we follow the mind of a dying man revisiting the moments that defined him: the triumphs, the traumas, the heartbreaks, the delusions, the betrayals, his own and those of others. Through poetic introspection, the protagonist is forced to reinterpret past events under the shadow of impending death. Each memory is no longer inert, but active and dynamic, seen from the new vantage point of existential finality.
2018,
Carlos Gascón,
Karla Sofia Gascon,
Karla Sofía Gascón Ruiz,
Spanish,
